Overview

The Horn of Africa crisis of 2011-2012 affected 13 million people. The main focus of the crisis was across southern Ethiopia, south-central Somalia and northern Kenya. Regional drought came on top of successive bad rains and rising inflation. It ramped up a chronic livelihoods crisis into a tipping point of potential disaster by putting extreme pressure on food prices, livestock survival, and water and food availability. Armed conflict across the region compounded chronic ecological and economic vulnerability, which escalated the crisis and limited people’s survival and recovery choices. (IASC Real-Time Evaluation of the Humanitarian Response to the Horn of Africa Drought Crisis in Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya - Synthesis Report)

Despite early warnings, the Somalia famine was allowed to happen. Why? Because of politics, al-Shabaab and donor fears

The 2011 famine in Somalia, which the famine early warning systems network (Fewsnet) and the food security nutrition and analysis unit (FSNAU) estimate in a report published on Thursday to have killed almost 260,000 people, was avoidable.

Somalia's new government is beginning to build confidence in its ability to progress the country's recovery. The UK opened its new embassy – a collection of shipping containers painted white – in Mogadishu last week, and other European countries are following suit. Somalia's progress raises an immediate question: is it now time for hundreds of thousands of refugees and displaced people living in the region to return?

Overlooked by the state, children shining shoes for a living in the Somali capital are vulnerable to drugs, crime and militia gangs

Hamza Mohamed in Mogadishu

The muezzin calls for afternoon prayer. A small boy wearing torn trousers and a dirty, brown oversized T-shirt rushes from a shed. Holding a rusty paint tin, he stands at the entrance to Isbahaysiga mosque in Mogadishu, a short distance from Somalia's partially rebuilt houses of parliament.

With its stretches of wasteland covered with rubbish and dotted with rubble and ruined buildings, its scruffy vendors' shacks and broiling heat, the coastal town of Berbera is no beauty spot.

A former British protectorate, Somaliland was created in the 1880s to ensure supplies of meat for troops in the British Indian outpost in Aden, hence its nickname, "Aden's butcher's shop". These days, millions of animals are shipped every year from Berbera's port, built by the Soviet Union during the cold war, and it provides an economic lifeline for Somaliland.

Two decades on, Dadaab is home to many resourceful refugees who feel unable to return to Somalia

Dann Okoth in Dadaab, Kenya

Mohammed Bashir Sheik was four when he arrived at Dadaab refugee camp with his mother and sister 18 years ago. The family, along with tens of thousands of others, had fled the civil war in Somalia, looking for refuge over the border in north-east Kenya. His mother died when he was 14 and he grew up in the care of his sister.

Somalia's business community can support aid efforts – but humanitarian agencies must better understand how

Despite – or perhaps because of – more than 20 years of war, Somalia has a remarkably strong private sector, particularly in the money transfer, telecommunications and livestock spheres. Yet, as the 2010 Inter-Agency Standing Committee evaluation of the humanitarian response in Somalia points out, aid agencies have failed to engage systematically the Somali private sector and disapora in their work.

Pictures of starving children give donors an instant justification to release aid. Predictions of starvation, however accurate, do not

After the hunger crisis that engulfed east Africa last summer, there was plenty for the world to think about. After all, we'd been warned it was coming – the first alerts of a potential crisis came the previous year. But not enough was done to avert it, and we now know that failure cost tens of thousands of lives and millions of dollars in aid money.